


Kumo no Ito

by uumuu



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Halls of Mandos, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 22:12:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3427427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The thread appeared suddenly, a distinct line of shimmering silver in the gloom that surrounded him. It swirled down before Fëanor's eyes, the end of it coiling in a small spiral. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kumo no Ito

The thread appeared suddenly, a distinct line of shimmering silver in the gloom that surrounded him. It swirled down before Fëanor's eyes, the end of it coiling in a small spiral. 

Fëanor beheld it in astonishment.

The thread did little to alleviate the monotony of the Halls, a shroud of immutability to smother hopes and designs which would very likely engulf it too, yet he was spontaneously drawn to it. It hovered there, as if challenging him with its very presence, and the longer he peered at it, the more flustered he became. 

His curiosity stirred from the dormancy that had infringed upon it over a fathomless chasm of time spent with nothing to mull over save memories and barbed shards of dreams.

He wondered why it had appeared, and how. It couldn't have been sent by Námo. Námo was, as ever, banefully crude in his admonishments and rebukes. Employing tricks or riddles was extraneous to his nature.

He wondered if it had a purpose, and what it was made of. He tried to examine it against the palm of his right hand (of the faint shape that counted as his right hand in the Halls), and was startled when the two made contact. The sensation of physical touch was something he had all but forgotten. It was, to his naked fëa, like a sudden gust of icy wind forcing the breath out of one's lungs. He closed his hand, and shivered as the thread slid between his fingertips. He was unable to tell what material it was made of. It was satiny, and cold (but everything felt cold in the Halls). It was thin as spider's filaments, but much more resistant. He pulled on it, once, twice. It oscillated, but nothing more. 

It felt like it could hold a fëa's immaterial weight.

It could be a way out. 

He pulled on it harder, but it didn't snap. He lifted his head and followed its steady glimmer so far high up that he became dizzy. Whatever it was, it had to be a connection to some place else. 

His next move was an instinctive one: gather his sons, and together discuss what to do with the thread, if anything.

The seven of them were soon assembled around it, the empty vastness of the Halls a negligible detail confronted with their familiarity.

Curufin subjected it to the same intent scrutiny his father had, and came to the same conclusion as to its resistance. Caranthir appraised it from a spinner's perspective, though he couldn't tell what material it was made of, either. 

They all agreed it was a risky venture, but decided to try and climb the thread to where it had come from. It was impossible to tell where that would be, but it was difficult to imagine a worse outcome than that which had landed them in Mandos in the first place. And it would be a change, at least.

The difficult part was deciding in what order they should go. 

Fëanor wanted his sons to go first. His sons insisted that he should. 

Amrod suggested that they all climb at once. 

“The thread might not hold,” Curufin warned, letting his hand slide against it. “If we want to try, we must be cautious.” 

The others all nodded: alerting Námo to their attempt at escape wasn't what they needed.

“Then Father goes first,” Celegorm said, with a brashness that suggested a vivid memory of his powerful frame, the way he would have been crossing his arms over his chest to bolster his words and the way his muscles would have bulged with repressed energy.

“No, Turco. I think it's your right to take preceden-” Fëanor began to say, but couldn't finish, because the wave of anger from Celegorm nearly threw his fëa from its place. Caranthir, though silent at his brother's side, emanated the same anger. 

Celegorm drew close to his father, hovering before him. “We chose you because we wanted to, we were together with you at all times, and we lost you. I won't go anywhere without you.”

The love of his sons was the only true blessing Fëanor had ever had, the only one he had never wanted for. His heart still swelled with pride at their mere closeness, but festering behind it now was a feeling of uselessness and powerlessness. He had so much to give back to them that he was sure what was left of eternity wouldn't be enough. He would have wanted to shoulder all the blame for what had happened in Beleriand – what they had done as well as what had been done to them. They spurned the notion. They claimed that sufferance and death – the Oath and the Doom – had tried them, and drained them, but not turned them into cowards. 

“Do you think I'll be pleased to see you go?" Fëanor said, reaching out towards Celegorm with those flimsy hands that couldn't touch another fëa. "Would that I could take you all on my back and carry you away with me! You said it yourself, I wronged you by preceding you here. Let me be the one to follow this time.”

The discussion went on for a while – none of his sons had ever been easily persuaded, having all inherited his stubbornness in different degrees. Curufin put an end to it by resolving that he would go first. 

“I will go...and wait for you, wherever I might end up in,” he said, so that the others would have no time to keep bickering among themselves. He returned Caranthir's reproachful glare as he took hold of the thread with one of his unwavering own, and slowly hoisted himself up. 

It looked, from below, as if he were gradually sucked in by the darkness vaulting above their heads.

Amrod went next, but without looking at anybody. He knew that if he did, if he tarried, he would never be able to leave his brothers and father behind. 

Amras felt the same, and did hesitate. If it had been at all possible, he would have held onto his father's hand, and never let go.

“You can't make your brothers wait,” Fëanor reminded him, gently, but firmly. 

Amras turned towards the thread. “You can't make us wait either...you won't, right?”

Maedhros went after him, with a long rueful look at this father.

Caranthir followed, still uncharacteristically silent. If he had had a physical body he would have been tense, his agitation straining the confines of flesh, and his ascent was clumsy.

Celegorm remained with his father to the very last, and only with uneasy reluctance, pausing often to look back down at the progressively smaller and fainter figure, he climbed.

When Celegorm too had disappeared, Fëanor gripped the thread, and went.

It soon became apparent that his fëa was, in its entirety, too weighty, and still too fiery. It scorched the thread, and he felt it sizzle between his limbs. 

He stopped. He looked up. There was no sign of an end, an exit, no trace of his sons. 

The thread began to sway, and he was assailed by a paralysing sickness, suspended in a pit of nothingness that seemed to thicken around him, curdled by worry and the threat of impending separation. 

It would probably be for the best. If he was to fall, the fall could dissolve his fëa definitively, dispense him from struggle once and for all. His sons too would be finally free, free of the burden he had been to them. 

That thought made him even sicker. He desperately tried to recall his sons' faces as he hadn't seen them in ages. Maedhros had a mole on his right temple, and Caranthir's eyes were so dark they seemed to be all pupil. Amras had a scar in the middle of his forehead where he had hit his head against the corner of a table as a child, and Celegorm's nose had become slightly crooked after he had broken it in a fall. Curufin's ears had a downturned tip and Amrod had freckles only on the bridge of his nose and below his eyes. Perhaps he could find Maglor too, see his aquiline profile again. He gritted his teeth – the motion felt sharply physical – and resumed his upwards slog, even as he heard the thread sizzle louder, and crumble to ash beneath him.

He ignored it. He remembered the argument of moments before with Celegorm, the reluctance of all of them to go. He couldn't let them down one more time. He didn't want to lose them. He couldn't give up. If it was only a few paces, he had to go on, further the gap between himself and separation, no matter how hopeless the effort seemed.

It was not.

Those who waited had noticed what was happening to the thread, and pulled it up as speedily as they could, and not a moment too soon. 

Fëanor was hurled into a place of foggy silvery light, his reformed body colliding with the solid ground. 

He had barely time to register his new surroundings, to realise that he was out of Mandos, and alive (though sore) – that air filled his lungs and was infused with the heartening smell of damp earth –, before he was lifted bodily, and hugged in a stiff embrace by a big sobbing lump of red hair, warmth, and pulsing heartbeat. 

“Nelyo,” he whispered, the sound reverberating in his own ears.

Celegorm forcibly pushed Maedhros aside and took his place in the embrace. The others just tried to hug whatever part of him they could reach, and in so doing soothed the trembling that seized him in the wake of a relief too great not to be overwhelming. 

“Well, it didn't go as planned, but it worked nonetheless,” an unknown feminine voice said. 

Fëanor, again, shivered. Not merely because of the sound, or the words. His sons let him go, but remained close, and he turned to see a silver-haired woman who stood against the background of a narrow lake shielded by wooded hills.

“...M-Mother -”

Míriel held out her right hand towards him, hushing him. Fëanor's breath caught in this throat, but he took a few toddler-like wobbly steps forward and grasped the hand into his own. 

He stared at Míriel, at the face he very vaguely remembered from portraits and his father's descriptions, the face he had tried to bring to life in fantasies and dreams where she never died, and noticed that before it coiled the burnt end of a single strand of silver hair. His eyes widened. 

“How -”

“Thousands and thousands of years of silent observation helped me to pilfer a couple of Vairë's tricks. She never noticed!” Míriel smiled impishly. Fëanor had seen that smile before, many times. It was a very close relative of Amras's grin whenever he came up with a ruse to get back at someone, and of Caranthir's self-satisfied smirk. “And I was bored....I mean, I had really nothing to lose, beside stagnation.”

Fëanor jerkily nodded. He knew that feeling well.

There followed an awkward pause. 

“I-...I think it's really too late for me to be your mother. But...we could be friends?” Míriel hazarded, unsure what to do now that her gamble had paid off. 

She hadn't given much thought to how to handle that situation. She didn't even know what she had been expecting exactly, she had simply wished to bring Fëanor out of Mandos, motivated more by bare curiosity to meet him than anything else.

The impasse lasted enough for Caranthir to decide he'd kept quiet too long. “...parents literally are no use if they can't be friends to their children, once they're grown up. I mean, raising younglings is what animals do, but in the case of elves -”

Amrod elbowed him. “Moryo!”

“It's the truth!...I mean, I just-...I want to get to know you,” he yawped, turning towards Míriel again.

Míriel smiled. “Yes...yes. We have all the time we need for that. This place is _outside_ ”.

“Outside?” Fëanor parroted, tightening his hand around hers.

“Yes...it's a little complicated, I will explain it to you, later.” Míriel's eyes lost focus for a moment, as her mind went to the little girl whose voice and pain still echoed in that place, and who had given her tips on how to carry people through worlds. “This is a...different reality. We are free, free to go wherever we please, and we are in no hurry, but -” she looked at Curufin first, whom she had mistaken for his father when he had come up, nearly taking her hair out of the well, then at her other grandsons, and lastly at Fëanor again, “...first, there are the missing to seek."

**Author's Note:**

> This story was (obviously) inspired by Akutagawa Ryonosuke's short story of the same title (in turn based on a story in Dostojevsky), which is about a sinner in hell who's offered a means of escape in the shape of a spider's thread (= kumo no ito), but loses it because he refuses to share it with others (I don’t care about the theme of salvation, just to be clear).
> 
> I go by the idea that fëar in Mandos can look vaguely human here, but their expressions and the things they say are perceived rather than properly seen or heard (I'm not sure I was able to describe this well).
> 
> As for where they end up in, I wavered a lot, but then had a wacky idea and decided to go with it, i.e. they end up in Silent Hill, so the little girl Míriel thinks about is Alessa (this isn’t really determining to the story so bear with me). It's also in a world/different dimension where the Valar don't exist (the less Valar around the better).
> 
> The missing refers of course to Maglor, but I also headcanon that Curufin's wife was still out there somewhere.


End file.
